CAT FACTS

Deadcatting

“Let us suppose you are losing an argument”, the Lobby-hack-turned-Prime-Minister Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph in 2013. “The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case”

The solution, or “best bet” in Johnson’s own deceitful terms, “is to perform a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as ‘throwing a dead cat on the table, mate’”, the aim of which is to distract your onlookers to the point where “they will be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.

Toxoplasmosis

Concerns a parasite that only reproduces sexually in the gut of a cat. Eggs come out in the faeces, which can then make their way into intermediary hosts, such as mice, or humans.

When in a intermediary host body, the hatched toxoplasmosis parasites move throughout the body within immune cells. In the brain, it can stimulate the production of  can GABA an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Increase levels of GABA can increase compulsive behaviour, promote fearlessness. The common example is of infected mice, become fearless of cats, being eaten and thus allowing the parasite to sexually reproduce.

Toxomplasmosis can also have other effects, such as increased production of dopamine, leading to anxiety, and excitotoxicity, associated with disorders including Alzheimers.

The idea of a crazy cat lady could in fact be due to the woman being infected by her cats.

A third of all people are said to have toxoplasmosis, or at least have the parasites. But they are less often symptomatic. When I was a teenager, going on twenty, I had a great little pet cat called Polyanna. She had heaps of character, she used to jump up onto my chest if I clicked my fingers, and sleeping on my side, she’d sleep on my side. It was also a time of my life when I was reckless, fearless, compulsive. So I thought it might be due to toxoplasmosis, then again, it was most likely late onset puberty.

Cat-o-nine tails

A bad ass whip!

Polydactylism

Normal cats have a total of 18 toes, with five toes on each fore paw, and four toes on each hind paw; polydactyl cats may have as many as nine digits on their front or hind paws. Both Jake, a Canadian polydactyl cat, and Paws, an American polydactyl cat, were recognised by Guinness World Records as having the highest number of toes on a cat, 28. Tigger, a tabby polydactyl cat, also had 28 toes, but passed before it could be verified by Guinness World Records. Various combinations of anywhere from four to seven toes per paw are common. Polydactyly is most commonly found on the front paws only; it is rare for a cat to have polydactyl hind paws only, and polydactyly of all four paws is even less common.[

Save the Cat

The title, Save the Cat, is a screenwriting term coined by Blake Snyder and refers to a particular plot device. The save the cat method involves having the protagonist do something admirable toward the start of the story in order to establish them as a likable person and get the audience on their side

The 'Cat-Hat' man, Dr John Wamsley

John’s infamous fashion statement was made at the 1991 South Australian Tourism awards, where he wore the pelt of a feral cat on his head. His native animal sanctuary, Warrawong Wildlife Sanctuary, was up for an award, and John and his wife, Proo Geddes, saw a golden opportunity to make a powerful statement about one of the chief causes of biodiversity loss in Australia – feral invasive species.

John found solace in nature from an early age. The bush surrounding his rural home at Niagara Park on the central coast of New South Wales provided an escape from the noisy household he shared with his parents and six sisters. He showed an early gift for mathematics, excelled in it at school, gained a maths degree at the University of Newcastle and subsequently earned his PhD. He was also a natural businessman with strong commercial instincts and boasted an impressive property portfolio by his early 20s. In 1969, at the age of 30, he moved his young family to Adelaide to take up a teaching role at Flinders University. South Australia was the only state where it wasn’t illegal to keep native animals and he harboured an ambition to create a wildlife sanctuary. He bought a 14ha former dairy farm in the Adelaide Hills and named it Warrawong.

Warrawong’s most notable success was the successful breeding of the platypus, a creature extinct in SA since the 1970s and one that had proved notoriously hard to breed in captivity. John’s methods were always a potent reflection of his keen intellect, business nous and those firsthand observations of animal behaviour over long periods of time. He was no qualified biologist but his private conservation initiatives often succeeded where public efforts failed and he became a divisive and outspoken figure.

For more information on John and Earth Sanctuaries Limites (ESL) visit johnwamsley.com

Native Cat

Alternatively known as a Quoll, or of course other indigenous names, its a carnivorous marsupial. When living in the Western Desert of Australia, i learnt that the zoomorphic version, lets call him 'Quoll-man', was the leader of all the other animals in the epic Tingarri Cycle, the specific dreaming for the mob there.

Ship's cat

While Vikings don’t exactly have a reputation for being cuddly, their travel companions do. Hoping to shed some light on the early history of cats, in 2016 researchers reported the results of a study in which they sequenced the DNA of 209 felines, the remains of which had been found at various archaeological sites, dating from 15,000 to 2,700 years ago. What they discovered was that cats expanded geographically in two waves.

During the first wave, the feline critters traveled from the Middle East to the eastern Mediterranean, an area known for its fertile lands. This finding supports the long-held belief that farmers—in desperate need of rodent control—encouraged the spread of cats. The next wave—which occurred thousands of years later—started in ancient Egypt, where cats were worshipped, and moved to Africa and Eurasia via seafarers. Researchers notably found that the DNA from an Egyptian cat matched that of a feline found at a Viking site in Germany. It is believed that Vikings—along with other mariners—took cats on ships in order to control rats and mice. These findings are not surprising, given the presence of cats in Norse mythology. The goddess Freyja—who was in charge of love, fertility, battle, and death—traveled in a chariot pulled by two large cats.

Killers

There are 3.8 million pet cats in Australia. The feral cat population in our towns and cities is estimated at 0.7 million, but it could be as high as 2.5 million. New research by the Australian National University conducted for the Biodiversity Council, Invasive Species Council and Birdlife Australia found that roaming pet cats kill 546 million animals a year in Australia, 323 million of which are native animals, so about a million native animals a night.

Cat Gut

Catgut (also known as gut) is a type of chord that is prepared from the natural fiber found in the walls of animal intestines. Catgut makers usually use sheep or goat intestines, but occasionally use the intestines of cattle, hogs, horses, mules, or donkeys. Despite the name, catgut is not made from cat intestines.

The word catgut may have been an abbreviation of the word "cattlegut".

Alternatively, it may derive by folk etymology from kitgut or kitstring — the dialectal word kit, meaning fiddle, having at some point been confused with the word kit for a young cat, the word "kit" being possibly derived from Welsh. In the 16th century a "kit" was a "small fiddle used by dancing teachers," a name probably derived from a shortening of Old English cythere, from Latin cithara, from Greek kithara (see guitar).

Historically, catgut was the most common material for the strings of harps, lutes, violins, violas, cellos, double basses, acoustic guitars, and other stringed musical instruments, as well as the heads of older marching snare drums.

Most musical instruments produced today use strings with cores made of other materials, generally steel or synthetic polymer. Gut strings are the natural choice for many classical and baroque string players, and gut strings are still most commonly preferred in concert-tension pedal/grand and some lever harps because they give a richer, darker sound as well as withstanding high tension within low alto, tenor, and high-bass ranges. Many acoustic guitarists moved away from gut strings in the early 1900s when the C. F. Martin & Company introduced steel strings, which gave greater volume to the guitar. "The demand for steel came from ensemble players, who couldn't make themselves heard clearly without it."[7] Within a few years the majority of Martin guitars were made with steel strings to accommodate the demand. After World War II, most classical and flamenco guitarists switched from catgut to the new nylon strings for their greater smoothness, durability, and stability of intonation.

Before 1900, the best strings for musical instruments were reputedly from Italy. Musicians believed the best were from Naples, though Rome and other Italian cities also produced excellent strings. Today high quality gut strings are produced mostly in Italy, Germany, and the United States. They are also made elsewhere, for example in India and Morocco, for local use.

Catgut suture was once a widely used material in surgical settings. Catgut sutures remain in use in developing countries where they are locally less expensive and easier to obtain. Catgut treated with chromium salts, known as chromic catgut, is also used in surgery.

Natural gut is still used as a high-performance string in tennis racquets, although it had more popularity in the past and is being displaced by synthetic strings.

Catgut is also traditionally used to hang the weights in grandfather clocks.

Catgut was also used in early pocket timepieces from their invention up until the use of the Fusee chain.

Schrodinger's Cat

In simple terms, Schrödinger said that if you place a cat and something that could kill the cat (a radioactive atom) in a box and sealed it, you would not know if the cat were dead or alive until you opened the box, so that until the box was opened, the cat was both "dead and alive". 

A thought experiment, to show how ideas relevant to understanding quantum physics, where something can have one of either two states at the same time, don’t relate to classical physics objects, big things, like rocks, cats etc. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle I think is something like this: to observe a quantum particle, you need to shine a light wave onto it, which inherently changes it, so you never know , or are uncertain what the real state of the unseen or unobserved particle is.

So in his example, Schrodinger has a cat, in a box, some radioactive substance is released, which will in due course trigger the geiger counter which will activate the hammer, which will smash the toxic vial, and so kill the cat. We don't when the vial has been smashed, so we cant know if the cat is alive or dead, so we say it is both.

In simple terms, if you place a cat in a box with something that will eventually kill it, without opening the box, it is at both dead and alive. This dual state conforms with the ideas on quantum physics, but not classical physics.